“Singing the Epiphanic Song”: Lyric as Oppositional Practice in Juliana Spahr’s "That Winter the Wolf Came"

Inspired by the 2011 Occupy Oakland movement, Juliana Spahr’s volume of poetry "That Winter Wolf Came" (2015) brings to forefront major concerns contemporary politically engaged poetry, in particular question whether and how as a literary practice can engender oppositional political action nurture collective agency. This essay argues that volume, its attentiveness forms both their aesthetic dimensions, seeks resist reconfigure capitalist power structures prefigure alternative social arrangements. Within poetics, refrain emerges crucial formal device, an ambivalent figure repetition performatively creates disrupts rhythms. Furthermore, engages strategically with form lyric, mobilizing ostensibly immediate authentic voice autobiographical first-person speaker. Depicted embodied entangled, this speaker does not project transcendent subject, however, but performative stance models individual close affective ties others. Ultimately, Winter" celebrates crowd agent disarray: characterized openness possibility, crowd’s unsettles entrenched rhythms state-sanctioned capitalism.